Dan Smith
Lindsey Carmichael: What made you first aware of tattoos?
Dan Smith: The first thing I remember was seeing them on bands, the bands that my dad would play for me when I was young… lots of early English punk bands, and they would all have tattoos. And it wasn’t like I necessarily studied what they had, or really researched what they had, I just knew that they had them and I knew that they were awesome. I knew that it was going to be a huge, huge part of my life. You know?
But I needed a bridge. When you’re a kid and you look at a record, even if it’s a punk band, even if it’s a band you could go and see, which 99 percent of them weren’t, because I moved to New Zealand when I was six—but they were still rock stars, in some way. Obviously, punk isn’t like that so much, but to me, it was still a somewhat distant thing. So, I recognized that people had tattoos and I loved them more than anything, and so I was on a quest from a very young age to find that bridge. Do you know what I mean?
Yes. It was obtainable…
But I didn’t know how. I thought it was so cool, but I just didn’t know how to go about it.
Same as me. My first real exposure to tattoos was seeing them on bands.
Right.
And it didn’t really matter what it was, or what the exact marks were.
I was born in England, and all my family is English, so English music was definitely what I was born and bred on. And around the mid to late 70s, early 80s, there was such a huge revolution of music in England, with Oi! and skinhead bands, punk bands and New Wave stuff. And so that left a huge impact on me.
Can you tell me the name of the city you were born in again?
I was born in Middlesbrough, which is in the Northeast, in Yorkshire. My dad is from Middlesbrough and my mom is from Newcastle. And we were basically in the second wave of people leaving England for New Zealand. There were two big immigration waves. I think my auntie came maybe a few years prior, and you know, at that time in England—I was born in 1980—there was a lot going on. The country was changing a lot and my parents, they wanted the best life for me, so we left.
So you ended up in New Zealand, with your family and you were still really young.
I was young. But New Zealand is still very English, it’s part of the Commonwealth, obviously. And my whole family was there. And the music, humor, food—it was all fairly similar.
Also, from what I’ve heard from you before, where you were in New Zealand, it was kind of an isolated area, right? Where there wasn’t a whole lot of things going on?
Well, yeah. I mean it’s just such a small country. It’s the size of California, and there were 3 million people there when I was growing up. I lived in, technically, the biggest city, but that’s not saying it was big, you know?
Right.
So obviously, anything that you could be into, you had to search for.
This is pre-computers…
Totally. Anything that you could be into. You had to order it—and most places wouldn’t even ship there!
That’s what I heard. That it’s so far out, that if a package did come, it would take a really long time. Or it wouldn’t come at all.
Yup. So in the early days, anything that I was into, be it tattooing or music, if I found something that I was more than excited about…
A picture in a magazine, the back of a record…
It wouldn’t even matter. I’d cherish it. Scrapbooks… little boxes of stuff. Anything.
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